I STARTED out as a columnist in October 1988 and since then have been at it. It would mean that I have completed 37 years. In that long period, I want to believe I might have touched at least one hundred columns using the holistic perspective on Forbes Burnham.

Will my pieces on Burnham ever stop? I doubt it. It will come to an end when I reach my end. There are simply too many lacunae in the power display of Burnham that remain untravelled terrain. Here now is one more piece on Burnham. In the exercise of state power, governments as a rule do not make laws retroactively.

There are three reasons for that. It is antithetical to natural law. Secondly, it is a violation of any written constitution. Thirdly, it constitutes one of the worst immoral manifestations of abuse of rights. Generally, humans frown on laws and regulations being retroactive.

Forbes Burnham of course was an exception. When students entered the University of Guyana, they had to pay fees. I did that. In 1976 Burnham abolished fee-paying at UG. But Vincent Alexander remains a poor Burnhamite propagandist when in all his misplaced eulogies of Burnham, he failed to mention that instead of fees, Burnham instituted compulsory National Service (NS).

What was demonic about Burnham’s mentality is that he dismissed the inherent evil in retroactive laws. People who paid for UG tuition before 1976 should not have had that imposition thrown on them. UG at the time didn’t have the semester system. It was the year-to-year academic classes. What Burnham should have done was to tie compulsory NS into the new academic year of 1976 beginning with 1976 applicants.

Students like me who paid their fees with legitimate expectations when we entered UG in 1974 found that they now had to do compulsory NS. Hundreds of UG graduates from that era allowed Vincent Alexander to get away with a gargantuan non-truth when he wrote that NS was not compulsory in 1976 at UG.

In writing about this fiction by Alexander, I called out one of the most known civil society activists in Guyana, Vanda Radzik. She and I were friends on the campus, and we both refused to do compulsory NS and had our enrollment terminated. After she could no longer attend UG, she left for the interior and shortly after wrote me a letter about life in the interior that I have kept up to this day.

The letter is 49 years old. I am quite happy to return the paper to her if she would like to have it. I thought that since Vanda writes about everything under the sun (an observation Adam Harris once made of my media career), she would have confronted Alexander with his pro-Burnham propaganda. But life is about unexpected changes. Vanda has become an undiluted anti-PPP activist so she has something in common with Alexander and that may be the reason for not correcting Alexander.

In the November 26 edition of the Stabroek News, someone signed their name as D. Gorbardhan, an engineering UG graduate, below a letter condemning compulsory NS and concluded that the 1976 abolition of fee-paying at UG did not make free education real because students were compelled to do NS. The letter writer also referenced the mistreatment UG students faced at NS locations at Kimbia and Papaya.

Alexander replied to Gorbardhan in a Stabroek News letter on November 28. Because the letter writer wrote about compulsory NS, Vincent described the man as a psychopath. I quote Alexander: “It is sad that the Gorbadhans render themselves to be psychopaths and strangers to the truth as a concept and a fact.” When I read that accusation against the letter writer, I thought of that ancient saying: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”

I would never believe that a person could be described as a psychopath for simply outlining some things that happened at UG that are factual. There is no venom or acid in Gorbardhan’ missive. He simply made the point that Burnham’s free education at UG from 1976 was not really free because there was the onerous imposition of NS.

1. Gorbardhan simply spoke of harassment of UG students at KImbia and Payaya. I would never believe for all the decades I have known Vincent (we were born a corner apart in Wortmanville), he would stoop to that low level and refer to people he debates as psychopaths.

But the man spoke the truth about KImbia and Payaya. In Austin’s Bookstore, Mahadai Das told me about her harrowing experience at the National Service, and I made it public after she died by suicide.

Mahadia also confessed to several other known Guyanese. What drove Mahadai to psychosis was not only that experience but its denial by people in the Burnham Government, including Burnham himself who she trusted and admired.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.